You should have this goal for your product or service. What information will help set the buying criteria in your favor? No matter what you sell, data makes your information work harder. Also, it needs to be said that the more complex your product or service is the better the opportunity to appear as an expert. If you come from the place of truly wanting to serve your buyer, then being a market expert-not just a product expert-means being more knowledgeable than any of your competitors. This is easy to do as most of your competitors will be more concerned about selling product than about positioning themselves as experts.
In every case where I have personally run companies using these strategies or helped clients do the same, we have literally slaughtered our competitors. Even after they see what we are doing they cannot grasp it. Truly, building a core story or stadium pitch is working smarter not harder. The one who gives the market the most and best information will always slaughter the one who just wants to sell products or services. Here's the key to choosing which data to include. Market data is way more motivational than product data. Most people think that a shoe is a shoe (product data), but when you learn that your feet connect to every organ in your body, that's market data. It makes your choice of shoe much more important. So think about what market data is there that makes your products or services MUCH more important?
Here are two more examples of Education based marketing. I worked with a company that sold research aids to tax experts such as accountants and lawyers. They were focused on product data: They would say," Here's our research aid and here's what it does." I changed their focus to market data: "The IRS now requires you to take these 22 steps in your research. These are steps you can't possibly bill to the client, as no client will pay for all this. So what you can do instead is use our products. These products speed up this process." Market data made the product data much more important.
Why? Bookstores were putting the calendars right by the cash registers. When do you buy calendars? At the end of the year. So there you are standing in line waiting to check out all your Christmas gifts and you see a calendar on Mustangs. Your boss loves classic Mustangs. You buy him a calendar. The mass merchants were putting the calendars in the back by the stationary department. They weren't moving nearly as many calendars per rack or spinner. By showing this data to more and more stores, this client increased sales 20% in a single year whereas they had not had an increase in sales for four years prior to using this market data to motivate better positioning of the calendars. And it goes on and on. No matter who you are or what you sell, you need to take the time to collect market data and build your "core story" or your "stadium pitch." Today the Internet makes market data readily available. Sites like www.census.gov, www.CNN.com and other sources have great information on just about any subject you can imagine. You will have no trouble gathering massive amounts of data for your core story. The problem is finding the time to put it all together. Luckily, there is a company called Empire Research Group (www.empireresearchgroup.com) that can actually do all this work for you.
Chet Holmes has worked with over 60 of the Fortune 500 companies as America's top marketing executive, trainer, and strategic consultant. Chet is the author of the best selling book, The Ultimate Sales Machine (#1 business book on Amazon, #1 Sales and Marketing book on Amazon, and also on NY Times best seller list). Chet has identified and developed the 12 core competencies that are proven to provide the main structure of truly great companies and he has developed more than fifty proprietary methods to implement them. To learn more about how to double the sales of your company, go to www.howtodoublesales.com
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